chris albert

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Saturday, July 02, 2016

I've been fortunate to have been kept rather busy - and employed - at at art institutions in the time since we arrived in South Florida last year, including PAMM. One of the perks of freelancing in the museum world is interacting with a wide range of dynamically creative folk.

One upcoming expression of this perk that I'm happy to be part of is the PAMM Staff Art Exhibit opening next Saturday, July 9 at the University of Miami Art Gallery in Wynwood. The gallery is located at 2750 NW 3rd Ave in Miami.

The reception is taking place from 4-10pm and the exhibit will run through August 21.

Tuesday, March 08, 2016

I have a sampling of paintings spanning over 10 years on view now at Albert Shahinian Fine Art in Rhinebeck, NY. The show has recently been extended through April 31.

Whimsy & Gesture is a three person show which also includes wire sculptures by Dick Crenson and collages by Travis Jeffrey.

Shahinian Fine Art is a cozy little space perched on the third floor of a building just east of the Market St/Rt 9 intersection. The gallery has a facebook page here, which will likely be the best place for information on upcoming events...like, for instance, if I'm able to make it up north to give a presentations in the gallery.....for instance.

My painting Christopher & Gay (fp) (from 2008 or 9?) is the image featured on the postcard above.

Monday, March 07, 2016

Artma, the biennial art auction event held in Denver to benefit research areas of childhood cancer was held again this year on February 20th.
I've participated in every iteration since its inception, including this year, although just barely. What with the upheaval of our move and the condensing of studio and home into a smaller home with ad hoc studio and storage space, I nearly didn't make the deadline. In fact I actually missed the deadline, but the organizers still welcomed my last minute contribution.

Flattened Buoy, Red 2012

The work I donated is a 2012 drawing done while on residency on Norton Island in Maine. The pastel drawing is one of several I made inspired by the colorful buoys arrayed in the waters around the island and washed up on the shore. Buoys were even re-purposed to mark the trails cutting through the woods of the island. The drawings were kind of schematic dissections of the buoys; a not so strict rendering of them as if they had been flayed and flattened.

A group of buoy, and other, drawings in process on Norton Island in 2012.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

On November 21, 2015 the Perez Art Museum hosted a performative talk by Nari Ward to accompany the opening of Ward's retrospective exhibit Sun Splashed, on view through February 21.

Upon entering the auditorium, the audience was treated to a back lit screen conjuring the silhouette of a body - that of the artist receiving a massage. This mise en scene was positioned to the left of the stage with two empty chairs and a podium to the right.

During the time when the massage was the only action on stage (about ten to fifteen minutes from the point we sat down,) I was vigilantly watching for any moments that would illustrate a crude shadow play gag like those in the Austen Powers movies.

Somewhere just before the moment when PAMM director Franklin Sirmans took to the podium to offer his introduction to the program and give a talk on Ward's work, a grumbling older couple (actually the wife was doing the grumbling) got up to leave out of impatient disgust. I worked on the exhibition installation and I was aware, at least broadly, of what Nari wanted to do in the talk. I'm always interested in how we all react to moments that thwart our expectations and try our patience or our gameness. We all have our limits and we have all undoubtedly missed out on something we may never know about having succumbed to those internal voices of hurried agitation. Being aware of those same mechanisms at work in our neighbors who might have relieved us of their presence and comments makes our reward - if there is one, and there is never a guarantee of one being there at the end - that much sweeter.

Were we rewarded? I think I was.

Before working on the exhibit I was not aware of Nari's work....I was sure I had seen it before but had never been conscious of it. As it turns out, I had installed a work of his at MoMA shortly after it had been aquired. That piece is in the current show at PAMM, proof that consciousness is a slow, additive process, and only when enough of the stuff sticks to the wall of our minds are we able maintain an awareness. The talk was a reward because through I learned what I perhaps should have known already. Sirmans gave a rundown of Ward's career and oeuvre, followed by exhibition curator Diana Nawi who presented a eulogy to the body of Ward's works that no longer exist, complete with a short bio giving the context of each work's creation, existence and demise.

With the eulogies presented and massage complete, Nari Ward sat down, wrapped thickly in a comfy looking robe, with Diana Nawi to take questions from the audience.

The choice of massage was performative for sure, but functional too in a way I think most would understand. First, having the obligation to present a talk of some sort to accompany one's retrospective (it's the least one might expect to have to do as a living artist being granted a retrospective by an institution, as annoying as it may be,) this bit of shadow theater freed Nari from having to do any of the heavy lifting (talking) during the program. I firmly believe in cases like this, it's almost always better to have someone other than the artist discuss that artist's work. It is the job of the curator or scholar to frame the artist's work for the public and if they are at least modestly able to speak before a group can offer a more robust and transferrable insight into the artist's work.

Secondly, the massage was both a demonstration of, and a coping mechanism to address, the unnatural, nerve racking task of standing before a theater of people and lecture to them on what it is you do, when, not 200 feet away sits the very embodiment of what you do, first hand, on its own terms and in its primary tongue.

Friday, October 30, 2015

Well, this is how the studio looked just before we vacated it at the end of August.....And it's still how I feel a little. I expected to put away the artmaking habit for a while until things got settled here in South Florida - Hollywood Fl. to be exact. I figured I'd devote my excess time to writing, and I've maintained that effort fairly consistently until just recently when I started getting some jobs in the area.

I've done just a little tinkering, my attention focused on objectness potential of the hollowed out coconut shells I've harvested from the tree in our back yard.

I haven't yet mustered the focus or energy to get much useful activity rolling, be it written or visual but that hankering is starting to scratch at the door. I'm just mustering up the gumption to get up and answer.

The studio I currently have rests largely in my head, but I have a corner or two I can commandeer when I need.

Sunday, July 19, 2015

The time is nigh. After some 13 years, we will soon be leaving Beacon. As such I will be holding an unbelievable, not to be repeated (in the foreseeable future) colossal, massive studio sale. I'll be offering up virtually all the artworks currently in my studio for an almost criminal price. One must see this to believe it. And you can, for one day only.

That day is August 8th.

Yes, in just three weeks I'll be unleashing an amazing opportunity for folks who adore my work, and are looking walk away with a wall-worthy piece of art to covet and hold dear at less than a dear price.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

OK, it's not truly a rhyme, but it is a little moment of extremities I enjoy seeing. This photo of Angelika's and this drawing of mine are hanging in our bedroom at the moment. I had put these passages together in my mind long before I physically placed the pieces next to one another.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Well, it's been a long long while, but I finally released a new podcast episode of the Dead Hare Radio Hour. This one, episode # 44, features a conversation with Harvey Tulcensky recorded when I visited Harvey's studio in Manhattan last Spring.

Harvey's artwork for the past 10 years plus has consisted of a growing body of small moleskin sketchbooks, numbering well into the hundreds, that he fills up with ballpoint pen drawings as if it were a metabolic process. Within this corpus of sketchbooks are countless opportunities for creating discrete statements by corralling a selection of books into a composition . Harvey hangs stacked arrangements of sketchbooks, streching their accordion pages out horizontally to create large, expressive wall reliefs.

A selection of books filled with ink applied with rubber stamps.

In our talk, Harvey tells of growing up in Detroit, making his way to NYC, via Vermont, living large as a ranch hand in Idaho, and how he arrived at the work he does today.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Over a couple of Saturdays in December I attended a printmaking master class at the Garrison Art Center, led by Rob Swainston. Rob is a Brooklyn based artist and printmaker who creates large scale, print-based installations - or "printstallations". In addition to creating his own work, Rob runs a collaborative print studio called Prints of Darkness.

The class Rob presented focused on creating multicolored woodblock prints using Photoshop to manage the color separation then transferring those separations to multiple blocks for printing.

GAC is hosting an exhibit of Rob's work, which is opening this Saturday, January 24. Rob's show, Carry On, will be in the Center's main gallery and in the adjacent gallery, prints created by class attendees will be on exhibit.
My fellow classmates; Barbara Smith Gioia, Michael Piotrowski, Hildreth Potts, Adolfo Silva-Sadder, William Stafford and Natalia Woodward, and I will show a sample of the prints we made in the class.

Monday, December 22, 2014

The October 11 opening of my exhibit HARBOR at Matteawan Gallery took place one year to the weekend after I executed a series of painted moves that ended up resulting in the base layers on which the Harbor compositions would be built.

This act of painting done on Columbus Day weekend in 2013 was the final "processing" of Advent 2011, the last project to appear on the board of kork. For Advent 2011 I sent postcard images of a 2001 painting, THA to 30 artists and asked them to manipulate the image in the photograph and mail it as a postcard back to the office of Deborah Bailey Browne CPA in Poughkeepsie, where it became an advent calendar marking the end of 2011 and the end of kork as an artspace - and some for some, possibly the end of the world with the apocryphal apocalypse of 2012 then looming on the horizon.

The collected Advent 2011 postcards.

I took all of these manipulated postcards as suggestions for how to improve or destroy the painting in question. The logical final step was to enact these suggestions on the actual painting and see what I came up with.
The video below is a time lapse capture of me going through the motions over the course of three days in October 2013.

After taking the painting through all of the iterations, I cut it up into smaller pieces to be used at a later date. As it turns out, most of the body of this old painting has reemerged in the collective body of of the Harbor paintings which, as a group consist of 15 paintings.

After having chosen HARBOR as the name of the exhibit and the paintings, thinking of the significances of the word, I came to recognize these new paintings tangibly harbor the physical and intellectual efforts of all the participating artists, forming a receptive bed for a new layer of information and making the whole concept worth that much more to me.